Keeper of the Keys

Back in the living room he examined the pillow on the couch, silk, that had been taken from a nearby chair. A hair, mid-length, gray-rooted, lay at the center.

He drew a final conclusion easily when he spotted her favorite sweater draped over a chair. His mother had come, crashed in his living room, and left again. She had thrown up. She was sick.

After Ray cleaned up the mess, placing the rags he used directly into the washing machine with copious amounts of detergent and bleach, he drank coffee he probably didn’t need in spite of his lack of sleep.

His mother had slept here, tossed her cookies.

She never drank. Could she be ill? But he wasn’t quite ready to call her.

A quick perusal of the kitchen told him that she had invaded the cupboard above his refrigerator and the mirrored bar. A bottle of vodka Leigh had bought months ago that had gathered dust was less than one-fourth full. Last time he had noticed, the bottle had been three-quarters full. Even if Leigh made several of her favorites, cranberry and vodka, she hadn’t drunk that much that fast in all the time he had known her.

Had he driven Esmé to this?

They had always had such a reliable relationship, loving in the way a mother and son had to love, superficially distant with an understood undercurrent. Now, the real nature of their relationship nagged at him like sinister whispers. What went on in her heart? What went on in his?

He tried to put himself in his mother’s position. He had risen up like a cobra hiding behind tall grasses, awaiting the right moment, attacking, determined to tear to bits her hard-won privacy. He had been very hard on her recently, denigrating the effect of all those years of love. Regret stabbed at him.

Afraid, he picked up the phone and called the house on Close Street in Whittier. She didn’t answer. He would have to drive over there, but he was too damn tired.

He left the shirt and the peanut shells in the trunk of the car and lay down just for a second on the living room couch.

And then it was Monday morning.

Esmé still didn’t answer.

He called the office. “Denise, my mother’s ill.”

“You have Mr. Antoniou at one!”

“Yeah, okay. Can you take the group of drawings on my desk and get them copied this morning? I made a few last-minute changes. Sorry.”

“Oh, man. That’ll cost extra for a rush job. You’re coming, though?”

“I’ll be there.”

“Because Martin’s here and he’s had a bad night and he’s rampaging around waiting for you.” She lowered her voice. “But screw him. I’ll take care of him.”

“Thanks, Denise. You’re a real-”

“Friend. You have quite a few here, Ray.”

He took twenty minutes to shave and get dressed, then called Detective Rappaport.

“Been trying to call you,” Rappaport said. “What’s wrong with your cell phone?”

“Why?”

“We checked on your bank account and found an ATM withdrawal, Mr. Jackson. From nine days ago.”

“Yes. I got the statement. That’s one of the things I wanted to tell you.”

“We have the videotape from the ATM machine for that date.”

“Is it Leigh?”

“We can’t tell. You may be able to help.”

“What do you mean, you can’t tell?”

“Don’t shout, Mr. Jackson. It’s hard to identify the person. The tape is not the best quality.”

“I guess this is a case now.”

“An investigation has been opened.”

“I found some things at the cabin at Idyllwild. They’re in the trunk of my car.”

“What?”

“I’ll bring them in.”

“I’m sending a car over to get you. What have you got?”

“Don’t send a car. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

Back inside the Porsche with its candy wrappers on the passenger side floor and the scent of Kat’s floral cologne, he decided that if this kept up he would need a bigger car, since this one had somehow become familiar as a second home. Unfortunately, the amount of time he had spent cleaning up his living room forced him into competition with every commuter on the planet earth, or so it seemed.

The Boxster crawled through a long morning’s heat.

An hour and a half later, when his mother still did not answer her doorbell in hot, smoggy Whittier, he used his key to get into the house.

He looked around in astonishment. She obviously hadn’t lifted a finger to clean in days. Wine bottles, several, sat or lay on the kitchen counter and floor. Lipstick-edged glasses decorated most of the tables she usually kept dust-free and gleaming.

A wretched scenario played itself out, unfurling like a movie in his mind. Tipped over the edge by Ray’s investigations into their past life, she had waited into the night, driven to his house over the limit, then drawn out her misery with alcohol when he did not appear.

He checked out the bathroom and glanced into the darkened bedroom. She had dropped a glass there and had not bothered to pick up the pieces. She wasn’t home.

This late on Monday morning, Esmé must be at her cash register at Granada ’s, although how in the world she dragged herself in considering the state she must be in was beyond him. He set to work restoring order to her kitchen and living room, moving glasses into the sink and finding a paper bag in which to put the wineglass shards.

He found bread and made himself toast, then cleaned up the crumbs, emptied out old milk, and wiped down the refrigerator, which also appeared neglected. Checking the time, he tried to estimate when she might finish her shift. He knew they constantly jockeyed around on shifts; she complained about it sometimes. He had arrived at about ten a.m. She worked six to eleven a.m. on Mondays.

Fishing out his cell phone, he called the market. Gle

He hung up, needing to decide what he wanted to say.

Laying his hands on the old Formica surfaces, he considered Esmé’s stubborn refusal to let him upgrade the place. It looked the same as it had when they had moved there when he was twelve. She had painted the back wall of her main room mauve, and mauve it remained. The gold wall-to-wall carpet had experienced different looks, as she did not seem opposed to using new area rugs here and there, but even the Danish modern furniture she liked because it was light and easy to move stayed roughly in the same place it had been in when Ray had learned to play chess on that very same glass-topped, rounded, wooden-edged coffee table so many years ago.

He sat for a few minutes, numb. His mind turned, like a mole digging toward air, toward the old houses, the tapes, the voice on the tapes. The model of the house on Bright Street, unfinished in his basement.

The thought struck him: I will never get it right, never get any of it right. The dark stain on the shirt in his trunk seemed to spread out through a crack in the trunk, spread along the driveway and into Esmé’s house, into his heart. At this rate, he’d never get through the day, and he had chosen to keep going, for a while at least. He needed something to occupy him while he waited for Esmé.

Finally he remembered the old albums. Where might she keep them? A tall bookcase held stacks of magazines and paper digests with short stories, her favorite reading. He began an exploration of the house, something he almost never did. Esmé liked her privacy. She demanded it, in fact, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had been in her bedroom, but he remembered a case with glass doors. Maybe she kept the albums in there? That seemed possible. In previous houses, she had kept them in her bedroom.

In the dimness, he could perceive almost nothing. The curtains in her room were closed. He flipped on the light to see everything much the same as it had been in his childhood except for fresh bedding in tones of rose, black, and beige to match the walls and new curtains. She had left the bed unmade. Incredible!